Theatre reviews: Exit The King and Home, I'm Darling

3 /
5 stars

Exit The King

As Hugh Grant’s scrofulous flatmate in Notting Hill, Rhys Ifans made an indelible impression by wearing the worst underpants in the world. His role in Eugène Ionesco’s absurdist play about a 483-year-old king who has one hour and 40 minutes to live should finally lay to rest the ghost of the ghastly Y-fronts.

Rhys Ifans as King Bérenger and Indira Virma as Queen Marguerite (Image: NC)

King Bérenger’s rule over a kingdom that has diminished to just five square miles is tenuous. In spite of early triumphs, he is now a self-deluding husk of a man who cannot get to grips with his mortality. Pale as a ghoul and wearing blue pyjamas beneath his long fur-lined train, he is a cross between Richard II and Alice Cooper.

While former wife Queen Marguerite (Indira Varma) and his current consort Queen Marie (Amy Morgan) attempt to prepare him for the end, Bérenger rails against the unfairness of it all like Faustus begging for more time on earth.

Derek Griffiths as the palace guard, Debra Gillett as a bustling cleaner and Adrian Scarborough as the royal physician all have their moments but the stage belongs to Ifans who thunders, whines and whispers like an old-school thespian.

Patrick Marber’s new version irons out the more Monty Pythonesque elements of Ionesco’s writing and introduces a level of reality but it refuses to fit the play’s tone.

King Bérenger becomes a self-deluding man who cannot get to grips with reality (Image: NC)

HOME, I’M DARLING ★★★

Laura Wade’s breakthrough play Posh skewered privileged undergraduates but she goes back in time to a version of the 1950s for Home, I’m Darling.

Judy and Johnny are a happy couple living in a classic mid-century house where Judy (Katherine Parkinson) is a domestic goddess who delivers breakfast to husband Johnny (Richard Harrington) with fierce attention to detail. She then sits down at the table and, in a reveal that comes too early, pulls out a laptop.

This is the present day and they have chosen to live the 1950s lifestyle, a less complicated and altogether kinder age. Or so they believe.

But there is a serpent in their fantasy paradise – reality. And when it rears its ugly head, disguised as debt, the fantasy unravels. Wade’s play taps into nostalgia for a post-war past with all the authenticity of a Walt Disney cartoon. But she also explores gender disparity and shifting attitudes between the sexes.

It is 1950s escapism in Home, I'm Darling (Image: MANUEL HARLAN)

Judy seems to be in the grip of a quiet mania. She is the daughter of feminist activist Sylvia (Sian Thomas) and was once a high-powered executive who earned more than her husband. Redundancy and a feminist mother are not strong enough motives for her inability to face present-day reality.

And when their lifestyle “experiment” proves too hard to maintain, the threat that hovers in the wings never quite materialises.

Parkinson, however, is terrific and well matched by the cast around her, while Thomas delivers a show-stopping speech skewering their ludicrous 1950s fantasy.

I liked the fact they were living in Welwyn Garden City, one of the first “new” towns, but they might as well have moved to the Isle Of Man, where the 1950s lives on without need for cosmetic surgery.